Boards Engaging With NYC Pensions on Disclosure

Agenda – A Financial Times Service Article Written by Amanda Gerut That Uses MyLogIQ Data – By Amanda Gerut November 27, 2017

More than 100 companies have responded to the New York City Pension Funds’ Board Accountability 2.0 campaign during the past two months. The pension funds sent letters to 151 nominating and governance committee chairs in a bid to compel the boards to disclose individual directors’ skills, gender, ethnicity, age, tenure and — on a voluntary basis — sexual orientation.

For some boards, the transition from aggregate demographic information to director-specific information won’t be much of a shift.

According to data from SEC filings analyzer MyLogIQ, the Kinder Morgan board currently describes directors’ ethnicities with a sentence at the end of narrative disclosure about each director. For instance, in the 2017 proxy, one director’s investment experience is described, followed by his expertise in business operations, financial strategy and organizational structure. The narrative closes with the sentence, “As a Coptic Egyptian-American [the director] also brings an important diversity of perspective to our board.”